Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra promise A Fairytale Christmas

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Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra are promising A Fairytale Christmas as they take to the stage in Worthing Assembly Hall on Sunday, December 15 at 3pm (tickets through Worthing Theatres).

They will be joined by The Worthing Choral Society and Sompting Village Primary School Choir.

Orchestra music director Dominic Grier said: “We reinstated the Christmas concert in 2016, and it has been one of our most popular concerts. Some of the older members of the orchestra had some degree of nostalgia for it, and I'm not sure why it had been removed from our regular activities. It was not my proposal to bring it back. Some of the older members of the committee wanted to and it was such a success that we have kept at it. There was the demand and there was not much competition. Some of the choirs in Worthing have carol concerts but there was nothing really offering sing-along carols and Christmassy orchestral music and offering an adult choir and the children's choir.

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“There is a fixed element to the concert every year. At its core we do have sing-along carols and the kind of Christmas music that you might expect to hear on the radio, 12 Days Of Christmas and Star Carol and so on but there is always a bit of room for manoeuvre and I have started to introduce a bit of a theme. Last year I had Christmas on Broadway and this year it's going to be A Fairytale Christmas.”

You can expect selections from The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella.

“There will be quite an extended selection from the Tchaikovsky and it is fun to do. That's how you can keep stretching the orchestra. The last thing I want would be a concert of purely old favourites that the orchestra can churn out every year based on very little rehearsal. I don't think that that would provide enough for the regular players to get their teeth into. I want to present a concert to the same standard as the other concerts that we do and if you can do a big chunk of Act One of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker then that will be really rewarding for the crowds and for the players.

“The players love doing it. There is a lovely spirit to doing Christmas concerts or anything that is Christmassy. I think music has traditionally been a crucial part of Christmas celebrations, and people welcome the chance to experience that especially at a local level and to such a high standard.”

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The current season began in September but looking back over the end of the last season as well, 2024 will have been a good year for the orchestra.

“We have retained a lot of the new players that have come to us and that are of really excellent quality. They come from Chichester and Horsham and Burgess Hill and Haywards Heath and Brighton and Lewes and it is lovely to have a reputation so good that people are willing to travel some distance to play with us.

“And I think we have made some good choices in the programming. We have been ambitious in what we have done but we are retaining our audiences, and I think we do offer something that is different to the Symphony Orchestra. People do say that the sound profile is rather different. We are very, very full bodied and bass driven and very powerful and resonant as a sound in the Assembly Hall, and the venue has a great acoustic. It has always been renowned as one of the best acoustics in the south of England.”

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